Pope Francis & the Tenacity of Reaction
In his study of the Catholic Church and the Jesuit order, Antonio Gramsci declared, “The Society of Jesus is the last great religious order, of reactionary and authoritarian origin, with a repressive and ‘diplomatic’ character, whose origin signalized a stiffening of the Catholic organism”1. In the Jesuits, Gramsci saw a decaying Catholic Church whose internal reforms could only manage to maintain the Church’s power through force rather than a democratic process which would mend the rift between the clergy and the laity. Gramsci is widely known as one of the communists most concerned with the objective reality of social constructs—be they religions or what he referred to as “common sense”, yet even Gramsci had a pessimistic view of the Catholic Church’s ability to survive.
Does this view match history, or is it yet another example of overeager Marxists prematurely declaring the collapse of a reactionary institution? A glance at the modern Catholic Church would suggest the latter. Pope Francis, a Jesuit, is best known for being a progressive departure from his predecessors; he has acted in a way that causes people—accurately or not—to refer to him as the “woke Pope”. However, recent history in Nicaragua is one of many demonstrations that Pope Francis has not in fact transformed his institution from a bastion of reaction into one of progress. The bishops of Nicaragua used their financial assets and influence in the CEN (a conference of Catholic bishops reputed for helping to negotiate peace between the Sandinistas and the Contras) to sustain the deadly, US-backed coup attempt against the Sandinista government in 20182. In light of the Pope’s reactionary role in plotting alongside the US to undermine socialist governments, should we regard his progressive rhetoric as hollow, devoid of substance?
We can only reach an accurate answer if we avoid thinking that the substance of Pope Francis’s rhetoric lies in the Vatican’s internal movement, and not as a result of its relation to world-progress. When Pope Francis says, “The worship of the ancient golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose”3, he is employing religious imagery to critique capitalism for placing the market as an impersonal force overriding human concern. While his analysis is unscientific, it gains weight by mirroring—consciously or unconsciously—the critique leveled by Marx in Capital against a social system which tethers even the capitalist class to the laws of the market. Pope Francis is not a Marxist, but he rules the Church in a world that has felt the shockwaves of the October Revolution in every political crevice. He is not a liberation theologist, but he must preside over a laity who are increasingly exposed to a countercurrent of popular Latin American Catholicism which supports socialist liberation.
To survive, religion must adapt to a post-Soviet world where even Western capitalist countries adopted socialistic programs to compete with the USSR, and Pope Francis has demonstrated this not only through his rhetoric, but also through a conciliatory approach to liberation theology. Despite discounting the movement as “for the people but never with them”, Francis has been compelled to canonize Archbishop Oscar Romero for his martyrdom while fighting the Somoza dictatorship, and he has reconciled the Vatican with the founder of liberation theology, Gustavo Gutiérrez4. The Church’s conspiracies against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua are consistent with the anxiety prompting these gestures. The Sandinista movement represents a powerful testament to liberation theology’s concrete potential, having declared that “our experience shows that when Christians, basing themselves on their faith, are capable of responding to the needs of the people and of history, those very beliefs lead them to revolutionary activism”5. To avoid being undermined by the countercurrent of liberation theology, the Vatican must accommodate its followers’ rhetoric while conspiring to break their political power.
In this process, we can see that Gramsci’s diagnosis may have been premature but not unfounded. The plotting of the Nicaraguan bishops in 2018 did not strengthen the Catholic Church there; in fact, it further reduced people’s faith in official Catholicism, as the Catholic share of the Nicaraguan population reduced from 50% in 2015 to 37% in 20226. Furthermore, Pope Francis’s reforms have similarly failed to reach their implied goals. At this year’s Synod on Synodality, symbolic gestures such as the attendance and ability to vote of women and laypeople did not result in the ordination of women, the democratization of the clergy, or any substantial agreements on the LGBTIQ community (an acronym which is absent from the 40+ page synthesis report released by the Synod)7. The Catholic Church’s skillful blend of diplomacy and subterfuge cannot overcome its reactionary nature or the building weight of world-progress, just as the imperialist countries have been forced by capitalism to discard their socialistic programs under the banner of neoliberalism.
The Vatican must be attacked according to the weakness its conduct exposes. Liberation theology’s success throughout Latin America has primed it to succeed where communism failed in Eastern Europe, advised by Stalin to “isolate the Catholic hierarchy and drive a wedge between the Vatican and the believers”8. In post-war Italy and socialist Poland, the inability of communists to accomplish this feat allowed the Vatican to do successfully what they failed to accomplish in Nicaragua in 2018. The Sandinista government is correct in repressing the Catholic Church’s tentacles in their country to prevent a regrouping of these bishops’ clandestine activity. In the West, our attitude towards organized religion must reflect this history; reactionary use of organized religion can be most effectively fought when a split is aggravated between the organized clique of religion and its inability to meet the material demands of its lay community.
Further, the Catholic Church’s counterrevolutionary success in Europe show that a materialist stance does not guarantee a superior ability to adapt over religious organizations. This should especially be clear thanks to recent events in Gaza. Despite attempts by many Western communists to focus on the Marxist-Leninist PFLP’s role in this war of liberation, it must be acknowledged that an Islamic party, Hamas, has played a more central role as the current vanguard of the Palestinian Resistance. While the PFLP has remained a part of the PLO, Hamas has gained political popularity and military strength by violently rejecting the PLO’s Oslo Accords with Israel and then participating in elections in 2006 to gain a parliamentary majority in the Palestinian Authority. Their operation on October 7th was another example of Hamas’s ability to seize the political moment—the moment in this case being Israel’s internal division.
The Hamas charter declares that Islam “upholds the value of truth, justice, freedom, and dignity and prohibits all forms of injustice and incriminates oppressors irrespective of their religion, race, gender, or nationality”9. We should regard this development of Hamas’s view of Islam in a similar vein to Pope Francis’s courting of liberation theology. As a progressive force, Hamas must also promote its religion as an inclusive ideology to strengthen its political unity and popularity. These calculations result from objective material conditions—the strength of Islam in Palestine and Islam’s ability to be interpreted progressively—and the subjective actions of the Palestinian Resistance must be based on these grounds.
Religion remains a potent force among both reaction and revolution not because of any metaphysical appeal to humanity, but rather because of humanity’s ability to subjectively breakdown and adapt its objective constructs to present conditions. Yet the disconnect between religion and the material reality of the world remains a contradiction which no adaptation can erase. For Hamas, this contradiction may not be antagonistic, but for the Vatican, it’s an ever-tightening noose, preparing each day to fulfill Gramsci’s prediction.
Bibliography
Gramsci, Antonio. The Modern Prince & Other Writings. New York: International Publishers, 1968. (p. 66)
Littlejohn, Coleen. “The Catholic Church Hierarchy and their Role in Nicaragua’s Political Crisis.” In Live From Nicaragua: Uprising or Coup?, 245-57. Alliance for Global Justice, 2019.
https://afgj.org/nicanotes-what-was-the-catholic-churchs-role-in-the-coup-conclusion
Francis. Apostolic Exhortation: Evangelii Gaudium. Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2013. (§ 55)
https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html#No_to_the_new_idolatry_of_money
Kirchgaessner, Stephanie, and Jonathan Watts. “Catholic Church Warms to Liberation Theology as Founder Heads to Vatican.” The Guardian, May 11, 2015.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/11/vatican-new-chapter-liberation-theology-founder-gustavo-gutierrez
National Directorate of the FSLN. “The Role of Religion in the New Nicaragua.” In Sandinistas Speak, 105-12. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982. (p. 107)
Renk, Becca Mohally. “Catholic Church Backed Violent Coup Attempt in Nicaragua, Meddles in Politics.” Geopolitical Economy, August 29, 2022.
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/08/29/catholic-church-coup-nicaragua/
Hunt, Mary E. “The Catholic Synod Offers Little Hope for Real Change in the Church.” Women’s Media Center, November 10, 2023.
https://womensmediacenter.com/news-features/the-catholic-synod-offers-little-hope-for-real-change-in-the-church
McGreevy, John T. Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022. (p. 234)
A Document of General Principles & Policies. Gaza: Hamas Media Office, 2017. (§ 9)